Tag: Truth

Climate Change and Humanity

A powerful essay by Tom Engelhardt from his blogsite TomDispatch.

Regular readers of Learning from Dogs know that essays from TomDispatch often find their way onto these pages.  They are republished with the generous permission of Tom and I endeavour to select those essays that shine a new light on a current issue.   No less so than with today’s essay, first published over on TomDispatch on May 22nd, 2014.

Just a note before you start reading Tom’s very important essay.  That there are many links to papers, articles and other references throughout the essay.  (I know, they took me a couple of hours to set up!)  Could I recommend strongly that you ‘click’ on each link and make a note of the references you wish to read at a later time.  I shall be referring to some of them next week when I comment more generally on this fabulous essay.

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Tomgram: Engelhardt, Is Climate Change a Crime Against Humanity?

The 95% Doctrine

Climate Change as a Weapon of Mass Destruction 

By Tom Engelhardt

Who could forget? At the time, in the fall of 2002, there was such a drumbeat of “information” from top figures in the Bush administration about the secret Iraqi program to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and so endanger the United States. And who — other than a few suckers — could have doubted that Saddam Hussein was eventually going to get a nuclear weapon? The only question, as our vice president suggested on “Meet the Press,” was: Would it take one year or five? And he wasn’t alone in his fears, since there was plenty of proof of what was going on. For starters, there were those “specially designed aluminum tubes” that the Iraqi autocrat had ordered as components for centrifuges to enrich uranium in his thriving nuclear weapons program. Reporters Judith Miller and Michael Gordon hit the front page of the New York Times with that story on September 8, 2002.

Then there were those “mushroom clouds” that Condoleezza Rice, our national security advisor, was so publicly worried about — the ones destined to rise over American cities if we didn’t do something to stop Saddam. As she fretted in a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer on that same September 8th, “[W]e don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” No, indeed, and nor, it turned out, did Congress!

And just in case you weren’t anxious enough about the looming Iraqi threat, there were those unmanned aerial vehicles — Saddam’s drones! — that could be armed with chemical or biological WMD from his arsenal and flown over America’s East Coast cities with unimaginable results. President George W. Bush went on TV to talk about them and congressional votes were changed in favor of war thanks to hair-raising secret administration briefings about them on Capitol Hill.

In the end, it turned out that Saddam had no weapons program, no nuclear bomb in the offing, no centrifuges for those aluminum pipes, no biological or chemical weapons caches, and no drone aircraft to deliver his nonexistent weapons of mass destruction (nor any ships capable of putting those nonexistent robotic planes in the vicinity of the U.S. coast). But what if he had? Who wanted to take that chance? Not Vice President Dick Cheney, certainly. Inside the Bush administration he propounded something that journalist Ron Suskind later dubbed the “one percent doctrine.” Its essence was this: if there was even a 1% chance of an attack on the United States, especially involving weapons of mass destruction, it must be dealt with as if it were a 95%-100% certainty.

Here’s the curious thing: if you look back on America’s apocalyptic fears of destruction during the first 14 years of this century, they largely involved three city-busting weapons that were fantasies of Washington’s fertile imperial imagination. There was that “bomb” of Saddam’s, which provided part of the pretext for a much-desired invasion of Iraq. There was the “bomb” of the mullahs, the Iranian fundamentalist regime that we’ve just loved to hate ever since they repaid us, in 1979, for the CIA’s overthrow of an elected government in 1953 and the installation of the Shah by taking the staff of the U.S. embassy in Tehran hostage. If you believed the news from Washington and Tel Aviv, the Iranians, too, were perilously close to producing a nuclear weapon or at least repeatedly on the verge of the verge of doing so. The production of that “Iranian bomb” has, for years, been a focus of American policy in the Middle East, the “brink” beyond which war has endlessly loomed. And yet there was and is no Iranian bomb, nor evidence that the Iranians were or are on the verge of producing one.

Finally, of course, there was al-Qaeda’s bomb, the “dirty bomb” that organization might somehow assemble, transport to the U.S., and set off in an American city, or the “loose nuke,” maybe from the Pakistani arsenal, with which it might do the same. This is the third fantasy bomb that has riveted American attention in these last years, even though there is less evidence for or likelihood of its imminent existence than of the Iraqi and Iranian ones.

To sum up, the strange thing about end-of-the-world-as-we’ve-known-it scenarios from Washington, post-9/11, is this: with a single exception, they involved only non-existent weapons of mass destruction. A fourth weapon — one that existed but played a more modest role in Washington’s fantasies — was North Korea’s perfectly real bomb, which in these years the North Koreans were incapable of delivering to American shores.

The “Good News” About Climate Change

In a world in which nuclear weapons remain a crucial coin of the realm when it comes to global power, none of these examples could quite be classified as 0% dangers. Saddam had once had a nuclear program, just not in 2002-2003, and also chemical weapons, which he used against Iranian troops in his 1980s war with their country (with the help of targeting information from the U.S. military) and against his own Kurdish population. The Iranians might (or might not) have been preparing their nuclear program for a possible weapons breakout capability, and al-Qaeda certainly would not have rejected a loose nuke, if one were available (though that organization’s ability to use it would still have been questionable).

In the meantime, the giant arsenals of WMD in existence, the American, Russian, Chinese, Israeli, Pakistani, and Indian ones that might actually have left a crippled or devastated planet behind, remained largely off the American radar screen. In the case of the Indian arsenal, the Bush administration actually lent an indirect hand to its expansion. So it was twenty-first-century typical when President Obama, trying to put Russia’s recent actions in the Ukraine in perspective, said, “Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors. I continue to be much more concerned when it comes to our security with the prospect of a nuclear weapon going off in Manhattan.”

Once again, an American president was focused on a bomb that would raise a mushroom cloud over Manhattan. And which bomb, exactly, was that, Mr. President?

Of course, there was a weapon of mass destruction that could indeed do staggering damage to or someday simply drown New York City, Washington D.C., Miami, and other East coast cities. It had its own efficient delivery systems — no nonexistent drones or Islamic fanatics needed. And unlike the Iraqi, Iranian, or al-Qaeda bombs, it was guaranteed to be delivered to our shores unless preventive action was taken soon. No one needed to hunt for its secret facilities. It was a weapons system whose production plants sat in full view right here in the United States, as well as in Europe, China, and India, as well as in Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, and other energy states.

So here’s a question I’d like any of you living in or visiting Wyoming to ask the former vice president, should you run into him in a state that’s notoriously thin on population: How would he feel about acting preventively, if instead of a 1% chance that some country with weapons of mass destruction might use them against us, there was at least a 95% — and likely as not a 100% — chance of them being set off on our soil? Let’s be conservative, since the question is being posed to a well-known neoconservative. Ask him whether he would be in favor of pursuing the 95% doctrine the way he was the 1% version.

After all, thanks to a grim report in 2013 from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we know that there is now a 95%-100% likelihood that “human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming [of the planet] since the mid-20th century.” We know as well that the warming of the planet — thanks to the fossil fuel system we live by and the greenhouse gases it deposits in the atmosphere — is already doing real damage to our world and specifically to the United States, as a recent scientific report released by the White House made clear. We also know, with grimly reasonable certainty, what kinds of damage those 95%-100% odds are likely to translate into in the decades, and even centuries, to come if nothing changes radically: a temperature rise by century’s end that could exceed 10 degrees Fahrenheit, cascading species extinctions, staggeringly severe droughts across larger parts of the planet (as in the present long-term drought in the American West and Southwest), far more severe rainfall across other areas, more intense storms causing far greater damage, devastating heat waves on a scale no one in human history has ever experienced, masses of refugees, rising global food prices, and among other catastrophes on the human agenda, rising sea levels that will drown coastal areas of the planet.

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From two scientific studies just released, for example, comes the news that the West Antarctic ice sheet, one of the great ice accumulations on the planet, has now begun a process of melting and collapse that could, centuries from now, raise world sea levels by a nightmarish 10 to 13 feet. That mass of ice is, according to the lead authors of one of the studies, already in “irreversible retreat,” which means — no matter what acts are taken from now on — a future death sentence for some of the world’s great cities. (And that’s without even the melting of the Greenland ice shield, not to speak of the rest of the ice in Antarctica.)

All of this, of course, will happen mainly because we humans continue to burn fossil fuels at an unprecedented rate and so annually deposit carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at record levels. In other words, we’re talking about weapons of mass destruction of a new kind. While some of their effects are already in play, the planetary destruction that nuclear weapons could cause almost instantaneously, or at least (given “nuclear winter” scenarios) within months, will, with climate change, take decades, if not centuries, to deliver its full, devastating planetary impact.

When we speak of WMD, we usually think of weapons — nuclear, biological, or chemical — that are delivered in a measurable moment in time. Consider climate change, then, a WMD on a particularly long fuse, already lit and there for any of us to see. Unlike the feared Iranian bomb or the Pakistani arsenal, you don’t need the CIA or the NSA to ferret such “weaponry” out. From oil wells to fracking structures, deep sea drilling rigs to platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, the machinery that produces this kind of WMD and ensures that it is continuously delivered to its planetary targets is in plain sight. Powerful as it may be, destructive as it will be, those who control it have faith that, being so long developing, it can remain in the open without panicking populations or calling any kind of destruction down on them.

The companies and energy states that produce such WMD remain remarkably open about what they’re doing. Generally speaking, they don’t hesitate to make public, or even boast about, their plans for the wholesale destruction of the planet, though of course they are never described that way. Nonetheless, if an Iraqi autocrat or Iranian mullahs spoke in similar fashion about producing nuclear weapons and how they were to be used, they would be toast.

Take ExxonMobil, one of the most profitable corporations in history. In early April, it released two reports that focused on how the company, as Bill McKibben has written, “planned to deal with the fact that [it] and other oil giants have many times more carbon in their collective reserves than scientists say we can safely burn.” He went on:

The company said that government restrictions that would force it to keep its [fossil fuel] reserves in the ground were ‘highly unlikely,’ and that they would not only dig them all up and burn them, but would continue to search for more gas and oil — a search that currently consumes about $100 million of its investors’ money every single day. ‘Based on this analysis, we are confident that none of our hydrocarbon reserves are now or will become “stranded.”‘

In other words, Exxon plans to exploit whatever fossil fuel reserves it possesses to their fullest extent. Government leaders involved in supporting the production of such weapons of mass destruction and their use are often similarly open about it, even while also discussing steps to mitigate their destructive effects. Take the White House, for instance. Here was a statement President Obama proudly made in Oklahoma in March 2012 on his energy policy:

Now, under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years. That’s important to know. Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75% of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some.

Similarly, on May 5th, just before the White House was to reveal that grim report on climate change in America, and with a Congress incapable of passing even the most rudimentary climate legislation aimed at making the country modestly more energy efficient, senior Obama adviser John Podesta appeared in the White House briefing room to brag about the administration’s “green” energy policy. “The United States,” he said, “is now the largest producer of natural gas in the world and the largest producer of gas and oil in the world. It’s projected that the United States will continue to be the largest producer of natural gas through 2030. For six straight months now, we’ve produced more oil here at home than we’ve imported from overseas. So that’s all a good-news story.”

Good news indeed, and from Vladmir Putin’s Russia, which just expanded its vast oil and gas holdings by a Maine-sized chunk of the Black Sea off Crimea, to Chinese “carbon bombs,” to Saudi Arabian production guarantees, similar “good-news stories” are similarly promoted. In essence, the creation of ever more greenhouse gases — of, that is, the engine of our future destruction — remains a “good news” story for ruling elites on planet Earth.

Weapons of Planetary Destruction

We know exactly what Dick Cheney — ready to go to war on a 1% possibility that some country might mean us harm — would answer, if asked about acting on the 95% doctrine. Who can doubt that his response would be similar to those of the giant energy companies, which have funded so much climate-change denialism and false science over the years? He would claim that the science simply isn’t “certain” enough (though “uncertainty” can, in fact, cut two ways), that before we commit vast sums to taking on the phenomenon, we need to know far more, and that, in any case, climate-change science is driven by a political agenda.

For Cheney & Co., it seemed obvious that acting on a 1% possibility was a sensible way to go in America’s “defense” and it’s no less gospel for them that acting on at least a 95% possibility isn’t. For the Republican Party as a whole, climate-change denial is by now nothing less than a litmus test of loyalty, and so even a 101% doctrine wouldn’t do when it comes to fossil fuels and this planet.

No point, of course, in blaming this on fossil fuels or even the carbon dioxide they give off when burned. These are no more weapons of mass destruction than are uranium-235 and plutonium-239. In this case, the weaponry is the production system that’s been set up to find, extract, sell at staggering profits, and burn those fossil fuels, and so create a greenhouse-gas planet. With climate change, there is no “Little Boy” or “Fat Man” equivalent, no simple weapon to focus on. In this sense, fracking is the weapons system, as is deep-sea drilling, as are those pipelines, and the gas stations, and the coal-fueled power plants, and the millions of cars filling global roads, and the accountants of the most profitable corporations in history.

All of it — everything that brings endless fossil fuels to market, makes those fuels eminently burnable, and helps suppress the development of non-fossil fuel alternatives — is the WMD. The CEOs of the planet’s giant energy corporations are the dangerous mullahs, the true fundamentalists, of planet Earth, since they are promoting a faith in fossil fuels which is guaranteed to lead us to some version of End Times.

Perhaps we need a new category of weapons with a new acronym to focus us on the nature of our present 95%-100% circumstances. Call them weapons of planetary destruction (WPD) or weapons of planetary harm (WPH). Only two weapons systems would clearly fit such categories. One would be nuclear weapons which, even in a localized war between Pakistan and India, could create some version of “nuclear winter” in which the planet was cut off from the sun by so much smoke and soot that it would grow colder fast, experience a massive loss of crops, of growing seasons, and of life. In the case of a major exchange of such weapons, we would be talking about “the sixth extinction” of planetary history.

Though on a different and harder to grasp time-scale, the burning of fossil fuels could end in a similar fashion — with a series of “irreversible” disasters that could essentially burn us and much other life off the Earth. This system of destruction on a planetary scale, facilitated by most of the ruling and corporate elites on the planet, is becoming (to bring into play another category not usually used in connection with climate change) the ultimate “crime against humanity” and, in fact, against most living things. It is becoming a “terracide.”

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture (from which some of this essay has been adapted). He runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.

Copyright 2014 Tom Engelhardt

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There are so many strong and fundamental points raised in this essay from Tom that I am going to return to them next week.  (Will give it a rest for July 4th!)

Trust, truth and community, Pt. Two.

Musings on truth and the corrosive nature of fear.

Yesterday, in Part One, I explored how easy it is to signal to the public that they are not to be trusted.  I used the case of PayPal’s changes to their ‘privacy’ policy which, as Wolf Richter wrote, only partially tongue-in-cheek perhaps, made “the NSA, which runs the most expansive spying dragnet in history, is by comparison a group of choirboys.”

Truth

Again, back to Roget’s Thesaurus.

truth noun

1. Correspondence with fact or truth: accuracy, correctness, exactitude, exactness, fidelity, veraciousness, veracity

2. Freedom from deceit or falseness: truthfulness, veracity

So that’s all clear then!

If only it was that easy.  So many aspects of our modern lives are exposed to complex issues.  None more complex than, of course, the issue of humans having a damaging effect on the planet’s climate.  Or if one wants something more esoteric then try the origins of the universe. (So far as the former is concerned, then my personal belief is that mankind is damaging the global climate.  But do I have the scientific background to support that belief? No Sir!)

However, one thing that our complex society does offer is the opportunity to spread fear. Indeed, fear pervades popular culture and the media.  I picked up that theme from an essay published by David L. Altheide and R. Sam Michalowski of Arizona State University.

Just a random example of the spread of fear.

The link to that essay is here. It opens, thus:

Fear pervades popular culture and the news media. Whether used as a noun, verb, adverb, or adjective, an ongoing study finds that the word “fear” pervades news reports across all sections of newspapers, and is shown to move or “travel” from one topic to another. The use of fear and the thematic emphases spawned by entertainment formats are consistent with a “discourse of fear,” or the pervasive communication, symbolic awareness and expectation that danger and risk are a central feature of the effective environment. A qualitative content analysis of a decade of news coverage in The Arizona Republic and several other major American news media (e.g., the Los Angeles Times, and ABC News) reveals that the word “fear” appears more often than it did several years ago, particularly in headlines, where its use has more than doubled. Comparative materials obtained through the Lexis/Nexis information base also reveals that certain themes are associated with a shifting focus of fear over the years (e.g., violence, drugs, AIDS), with the most recent increases associated with reports about children. Analysis suggests that this use of fear is consistent with popular culture oriented to pursuing a “problem frame” and entertainment formats, which also have social implications for social policy and reliance on formal agents of social control.

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. [my italics]

That last sentence offers the words of Edmund Burke, the Irish statesman and author from over 200 years ago. So, perhaps, nothing changes in this regard!

In my old country, the British press love to sell their newspapers on the back of fear.  Here are some examples of lurid front pages.

horse meat

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meltdown

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autism

However, it doesn’t end there. Fear of the unknown, of forces beyond our control, are behind the incredible number of conspiracy theories, many of them quite famous.  WikiPedia lists dozens of them. One that was voiced by friends of ours concerned HAARP, which is an acronym for High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program.  It was a perfectly legitimate research programme, one that was unclassified, albeit a program that was shut down in July, 2013.

But that didn’t stop it being regarded by many as deeply suspicious, “Many conspiracy theories surround HAARP. Some theorists believe that it is being used as a weather-controlling device that can trigger catastrophic events, such as floods, hurricanes, etc. Others believe that the government uses HAARP to send mind-controlling radio waves to humans.”  Taken from here.

As it happens, this was a programme that I was acquainted with back in my UK days.

OK, time to round this off.

This new, digital world allows the sharing and spreading of information in a manner unimaginable from, say, 25 years ago.  It has many positive attributes, as I will touch upon in tomorrow’s post.  But it also has the power to spread fear and misinformation.  In a world that is becoming more complex and more uncertain year by year, it takes effort by every one of us to stop, think and check on anything that has the potential to upset one.

It takes the power of community to keep us rooted in the stuff of our daily lives, to live calmly and stay in touch with the truth.  More on the power of community tomorrow.

Dear Dhalia

Now we are eight!

Dhalia was clearly close to death when Jean and I took her to our vet, Dr. Codd, earlier this morning.

Indeed, she was probably dead when Dr. Codd administered the euthanasia injection. It was 8:45 am.

While there is more I want to write about Dhalia, you’ll appreciate it if that is left for tomorrow’s post and I close this with a couple of photographs.

Dhaliagrave1

 

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Dhalia grave2

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For those that can’t read the plaque it says, “Heaven. All the dogs that ever loved you will be waiting at the gate.“

Dhalia has taken her last walk!

Life, and mortality.

Possibly the most important lesson we can learn from dogs!

I was aware when writing the concluding part of Meet the dogs – Pharaoh that the next day I would be faced with writing about a subject that is a whole degree more difficult.  Death!

It must have been in my mind when I wrote “of the need to smell the flowers in this short life of ours.”

What has prompted today’s post?

Simply that Dhalia developed a limp in her front, right-hand, leg.  That was a few weeks ago.  Naturally, we took her to our local vet, Dr. Codd, who diagnosed a strained elbow joint probably as a result of arthritis; Dhalia is believed to be ten-years-old.  With the recommended medication, the limp came to an end.

Then about two weeks ago, the elbow weakness appeared in her left-hand, front leg.

On Monday, we returned to Dr. Codd who took further X-rays and sought a second opinion.  That second opinion came back with the probability that it was a “osteoproliferative neoplastic lesion” or bone cancer to you and me!  It’s not one-hundred-per-cent certain but likely.

It only seemed like yesterday that Jean wrote about Dhalia in our ‘Meet the dogs’ series. That post included this photograph.

Love and Trust - Grandson Morten hugging Dhalia.
Love and Trust – Grandson Morten hugging Dhalia, September 2013.

Jean is very sad, as one would expect, nay we both are.  Dhalia, like Hazel and some of the other dogs here at home, has a loving openness towards humans that is truly remarkable when one learns of how these dogs came to be rescued: Dhalia being found by Jean living rough in a desolate part of a Mexican desert.  This is what Jean wrote in that ‘Meet the dogs‘ account:

I named her Dhalia and after treatments for mange she became quite beautiful. She was the pivotal part of a short story, Messages from the Night, Paul wrote back in 2011. Under her sweet exterior remains that same will to survive so evident when I rescued her all those years ago. There has been more than one occasion that she has brought me a recently killed squirrel or an ancient bone. We love our Dhalia: she still reaches out with her front paw when she seeks attention. Dhalia will be ten-years-old this year.

Somehow, Dhalia’s possible last few weeks of life resonated with much else going on.  Close to us, the recent death of a chicken, and one of our cats that does not have much longer to live.  In the wider world, the Washington State mud-slide, flight MH370, and the Ukraine.  The news media treat death as almost a trivial, incidental part of the scheme of things.

It takes others to offer words that elevate death to its deserved meaning.  Take, for example, author Brian Beker, who writes the blog The Dog in the Clouds.  Brian recently wrote the following post:

Prayer for an eagle

Please say a prayer for beautiful bald eagle who just died a death he did not deserve.

He was stuck on the ground near a concrete barrier on a stretch of interstate under construction in Arkansas. I spotted him with his head down, facing into the traffic that was passing a foot away from him.

He was an adult bald eagle-big and brave, facing down the oncoming 18 wheelers.

There was no place to pull off, concrete barriers on both sides, so I went to the next exit and backtracked. My adrenaline was rushing in horror and fear. My plan was just to stop and block traffic, and pick him up. But he had been killed by the time I got back to him three or four minutes later.

I failed that bird.

I hope he is circling over the lakes and trees he loves.

Back to learning about death from our dogs.

Dhalia’s possible terminal condition; my Pharaoh being the age he is; somewhere in there has come the recognition that we should embrace life yet also embrace our mortality; our death.  As Leonardo da Vinci was reputed to have said, “While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.”

What does death mean; truly mean?  I don’t know.  All I know is that death is the end of a life.  That our immortality is only an echo, a reverberation of who we were and what we stood for.  Or no better put than by American lawyer, Albert Pike, who left these words before he died on April 2nd, 1891 (Yes, I looked it up!)

What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us;

what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.

Last thought from our dogs. Recall that yesterday, I wrote, “Pharaoh has been my greatest inspiration of the power of unconditional love; of the need to smell the flowers in this short life of ours.”

Day in, day out, anyone with dogs in their lives know how often they offer us simple acts of love.

A life of simple acts of love – now that does give death a meaning!

Dhalia - picture taken two days ago.
Dhalia – picture taken two days ago.

Meet the dogs – Sweeny!

Little Sweeny; our dog number seven.

Last week, I wrote about Hazel.  The week before Jean wrote about Casey. This week it’s back to Jean writing about the one little dog we have here at home: Sweeny.

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Sweeny

Sweeny - taken at the end of October, 2013, here in Oregon.
Sweeny – taken at the end of October, 2013, here in Oregon.

On that day we lost Poppy back in February, 2011, when we were still living in Payson, Arizona, it was as though she had been vaporised! Dear, sweet little Poppy.  A ten-pound Poodle mix I had rescued in Mexico.  She had been living in and around a Mexican construction site and when I rescued her she was very scrawny and without hair.  But Poppy, as I named her, soon blossomed into a little, blonde, beauty and I grew to love her very much.  Prior to Poppy, I had always liked the bigger dog but Poppy taught me the pleasures of a ‘lap’ dog that also happily slept under the covers at night with Paul and me.

The Granite Dells, near Payson, AZ. Picture taken February, 2012.
The Granite Dells, near Payson, AZ. Picture taken February, 2012.

Most afternoons in Payson, we took some of the dogs for a walk along a trail hike of about 2 miles.  The dogs were allowed to be off-leash and loved it.  Poppy always came and stayed with me, never leaving the trail as did the other, bigger dogs.  That February, it was a chilly Winter’s day (Payson and area were at 5,000 feet above sea-level) and we were all dropping down into a dry wash when I glanced behind to check that Poppy was handling the slope. To my total horror, she wasn’t in sight. Indeed, Poppy was never seen again.

Despite days spent scouring the terrain, notices in Payson shops, radio announcements on the local radio station; it all came to nought.  Poppy was gone!  Locals that we spoke with and who knew the area of desert where the trails were, the Granite Dells, were all of the opinion that Poppy had been stalked by a coyote that would most likely have grabbed her in an instant.  Such happenings had been known before.

I was inconsolable with guilt. I had let Poppy down by not giving her enough attention and it lay heavily upon me. For weeks and weeks I moped, missed her snuggles and that cute, little body crawling into the bed with me.  One day, I broached the idea with Paul of adopting a small dog from the local Humane Society.  Naturally, Paul agreed in an instant and in next to no time we had jumped in the car and were heading to the Society.

I wanted an older dog but the two small dogs that the Society had were really only suited for adoption into a one-dog household.  The Society did, however, have two puppies from a mother that had been taken in by them when that dog was heavily pregnant.  The pups had been born and raised at the shelter.

It was love at first sight when they handed me the puppy that was destined to become Sweeny.  Sweeny Todd to give him his full name was a two-pound bundle of fluff.

Sweeny loving Jeannie on the door-step of our Payson house; May, 2011.
Sweeny loving Jeannie on the door-step of our Payson house; May, 2011.

Today, Sweeny is a twenty-pound terrier mix.  A very ‘sassy’ little dog that is as much loved by his doggie brothers and sisters.  Sweeny, too, sleeps on the bed, laying alongside me and the edge of the bed so that he isn’t between Paul and me.  Sweeny has developed the habit of waking me in the morning by laying, full-bodied, over my face; to the point of me not being able to breathe.  Guess I shouldn’t have called him Sweeny Todd! 😉

No dog will ever take the place of Poppy or fully assuage me of my guilt that I still feel to some extent. But ‘The Sween’ has helped beyond measure.

Cleo and Sweeny, 2013. Our first Christmas Day in our home in Oregon.
Cleo and Sweeny, 2013. Our first Christmas Day in our home here in Oregon.

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Next week, meet our dog number eight.

Meet the dogs – Hazel

Hazel – our dog number six.

Last week Jean wrote about Casey. Slight difference this week in the sense that both Jean and I equally know the story of how Hazel came into our lives. So you are stuck with me today for the story of Hazel.

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Hazel

Picture of Hazel taken in the last twenty-four hours.
Picture of Hazel taken in the last twenty-four hours.

I first met Jean in Mexico; namely, in San Carlos, Sonora, Mexico to be precise.  Just a few days before Christmas, 2007.  At that time, Jean had 16 dogs, all of them rescues off the streets in and around San Carlos.  Jean was well-known for rescuing Mexican feral dogs.

In September, 2008 I travelled out to Mexico, via London-Los Angeles, with my Pharaoh. Jean and I have been together ever since.  In February, 2010, because we wanted to be married and to be married in the USA, we moved from San Carlos to Payson, in Arizona; some 80 miles North-East of Phoenix.

One morning, just a few days before we were due permanently to leave San Carlos and move our animals and belongings the 513 miles (827 km) to Payson, AZ, Jean went outside the front of the San Carlos house to find a very lost and disorientated black dog alone on the dusty street.  The dog was a female who in the last few weeks had given birth to puppies that had been weaned.  Obvious to Jean because the dog’s teats were still somewhat extended.

The dog had been abandoned outside in the street.  A not uncommon happening because many of the local Mexicans knew of Jean’s rescues over many years and when they wanted to abandon a dog it was done outside Jean’s house.  The poor people of San Carlos sometimes resorted to selling the puppies for a few Pesos and casting the mother dog adrift.

Of course the dog was taken in and we named her Hazel.  Right from Day One Hazel was the most delightful, loving dog and quickly attached herself to me.

The truest of love between a man and a dog!
The truest of love between a man and a dog!

Of all the dogs that we have here at home, and, trust me, many are extremely loving, my relationship with Hazel is precious beyond description.  She is in Pharaoh’s ‘group’ (Pharaoh, Hazel, Cleo, Sweeny and Dhalia) so sleeps in our bedroom at night.  Most nights Hazel is tucked up against me.

Plus frequently during the day Hazel will take an interest in what I am doing, as the next photograph illustrates.

Hazel taking an interest in my potterings.
Hazel taking an interest in my potterings.

Very little more that can be said without the risk of repeating myself.

If ever one wanted an example of the unconditional love that a dog can offer a human, then Hazel is that example.

ooOOoo

Precious creature!

Love over fear.

Do we chose love over fear?

On the 24th January this year, I published a post called 20:20 self-awareness.  To save you clicking the link and returning to that post, the essence was speaking clearly; not only to others but to ourselves.  I quoted George Bernard Shaw, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

Then went on to write:

Yet, what we hear and what we say are both modified, frequently unconsciously, by past events, experiences and trauma.  That being the case, then it is key, critically so, that we achieve the best possible self-awareness.  Because it is only through an understanding of our past that we come to learn of our sensitivities and our associated ‘tender spots’ and their potential for ‘pulling our strings’.

Closing the post by including a twenty-minute, documentary film about fear.  (Here it is again for those that missed it.)

One of the comments to that post was from Sue who writes the blog Dreamwalker’s Sanctuary. (It’s a beautiful blog, by the way.)

This was the comment left by Sue.

Fear is inherent in us all for that Flight or Fight mode.. But the F word has now been used and abused as it has been used as a useful tool .. Self awareness comes when we wake up to what our world is generating and we have a choice. We can allow ourselves to get embroiled within the Fear.. Or we can see it for what it is and who and what is creating that fear and why?…. Once that awareness kicks in we can see there is nothing to Fear but Fear itself… Living in the Now of a moment prevents us also from fearing the future, and fearing what has passed..

Easier said than done, I guarantee you .. But once you can get your head around it all… We breathe deeper and evenly and let all fear go… ( I am still working on this, I am not perfect by any means ) for as your video states its been ingrained within us for so long we know no other way, and we are a creature of habit!..

Thought provoking post, Paul thank you

Sue then pointed me to one of her essays, that I have the great pleasure of republishing today.

ooOOoo

Do You Chose Love Over Fear?

One Love Heart.
One Love Heart.

Remember those Prophesies of “2012”? I posted many of my thoughts upon this timeline which I thought was to mark the end of one era and the beginning of the Next – Maybe those ancients teachers didn’t know whether we would rise or fall as they marked the end of their calendar.

Maybe that fate awaits us still depending upon our choices we make in the Now dependant upon our Next actions!  But as we read through those  teachings of ancient prophecy  you will see also they speak  of transformation. Transformation requires Change, and we are being urged now to Think! Think outside our boxes as our comfort zones are now being tweaked as we become ever more sensitive to the Energy Shifts within our World.

Whether we realise it or not we are incarnated with a ‘Soul Mission’ even though we caught amnesia after we were born.  But more and more of us are thankfully waking up as we begin to remember who we are. It may have taken many life times and lessons to align with our present purpose as we pass through various stages on our journey, often not understanding the reasons for painful events and experiences.  It isn’t until later that we look back and see the gifts and healing which were given to us and that through them we learn to grow, letting go of the past as we step into the Now.

Giving Birth is not without pain, and our new earth is only now going through her own birthing pains.  We see it in the spasms of conflict, the wars, hunger, poverty, displacement of refugees and the destruction through pollution of Mother nature.  Pains which are now being experienced which we humans have carried with us over many life times. Pains that emerge as a build-up of our Fear and Prejudices.

The choices are simple: we either choose Fear or Love.

Even while writing this a sense of peace has swept over me as I smile to myself. I recently read an article which said “…we incarnate with these wounds and at a soul-level choose to encounter those whose actions catalyse us to resolve and heal our soul wounding“. That made me smile even wider as I have long held the belief that our enemies are our greatest teachers helping serve our soul’s growth as we learn the various lessons such as patience, kindness, love, forgiveness, and compassion.

We are each of us now experiencing shifts in our emotions and lives, as we feel the ‘Shift’ in energy within our Mother Earth who is calling us to wake up and remember who we are; as our vibrations alter.

When I first started my blog back in 2007 I stumbled almost by accident to the opening post. But it was no accident! In fact my very first post was an experiment called Smile. I wanted to make a difference even if it was only through the words of a poem.

As we ‘Lighten Up’, letting go of what we no longer need, we lift our vibration higher; as we leave behind the wounds of the past. We are Energy Beings – and it’s time now to realise we each are a part of the Whole, that Oneness that permeates all things with the same Energy.

We are now ‘Shifting’ from duality to Unity Consciousness. This was brought home again to me on how many of us are thinking similar thoughts even here on WordPress. We see similar themes as we link into the Mass Consciousness, as we join together our thoughts, as we link subconsciously to the Cosmic web of thoughts.

We need to be aware of the Power of our thoughts and how we can assist in raising our planet’s vibration and our own collective Consciousness.

Much has been spoken upon The Ascension. First we need to ascend through our own layers as we climb ever higher, leaving behind the things that no longer serve us.

We do that by not getting swept up in conflict, by being more loving and tolerant, by being compassionate rather than being judgmental holding hate and anger.

We need to put the Care back in the world. If we embrace and choose Love over fear and stop looking who to blame but start to set examples of living in harmony and unity, then the true magnificence of who we really are can begin to manifest that ‘Golden Age’ that was once prophesied to bring about Peace.

It is up to each one of us to pledge to change our own lives, because only that way will those prophesies come to fruition.

The Choice is Ours

Choose Well..

Love and Gratitude

Sue Dreamwalker..

ooOOoo

Unconditional Love.
Unconditional Love.

The most important thing we must learn from dogs.

Truth never follows a straight line.

“A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence.” Richard Dawkins.

Yesterday, I started down the road of determining how one gets to the truth of a complex issue.  I called the post Doggedly seeking the truth.  My proposition was effectively saying that just because a person believes in argument ‘a’ or argument ‘b’ that doesn’t of itself make ‘a’ or ‘b’ the truth.

Unwittingly, Martin Lack of the blog Lack of Environment reinforced that point in spades.  He wrote in a comment to yesterday’s post:

The deliberate spreading of misinformation is a fundamental part of the industry-led movement to deny the reality of anthropogenic climate disruption. Alex Rawls is just part of this campaign and I therefore do wish that you would consult me before deciding to help publicise and/or lend credence to such nonsense.

Now I have every sympathy for Martin’s outpourings of feelings; his blog is based on the conviction of his own beliefs. A position of integrity.

But taken literally, Martin’s words, “consult me before deciding to help publicise” mean that he wishes to influence what I choose to write.  Of course he didn’t mean to convey that.

Back to yesterday’s post.  With Dan’s permission, I reproduced the personal email that he sent me with those two articles.  Dan isn’t on the payroll of the Koch brothers or blindly following an “industry-led movement to deny the reality of anthropogenic climate disruption“, he is a thinking human who is yet to be convinced that AGW is as rational a process as, say, gravity!

Humans are not fundamentally rational; we are emotional beings who even in this 21st century have little real understanding of what a human being is. (Must be honest and say that this last sentence is a tickler for a mind-opening video on the nature of human consciousness coming out on Friday.)

So if Dan is not convinced about the effects that mankind is having on Planet Earth, then spare a moment to ponder about the millions of others around the world who are far less capable, even if they had the time and inclination, to adopt a rational, open-minded view of the complexity of AGW.

It gets even more convoluted.  In Professor McPherson’s video that was presented yesterday, this gets said, “If we act as if it’s too late, then we becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy”.  On the face of it, that’s obvious. But on Guy McPherson’s blog Nature Bats Last the video has it’s own post and includes a comment left by Daniel, from which I quote:

Guy,

There are so many insoluble dilemmas concerning industrial civilization, it’s almost impossible for anyone to attempt to propose a “solution”, or attempt to describe the work that now needs to be done, without becoming a hypocrite.

At this stage, hypocrisy is unavoidable. Beyond the point of overshoot, at least in our culture, all that’s required to be a hypocrite, is to be alive.

I have watched your presentation evolve over the last few months, and with this latest one, something struck me as peculiar. You’ve added this line:

“If we act as if it’s too late, then we becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy”.

Basically, implying that we shouldn’t accept that it’s too late. Yes?

The evidence that now exists, has established an immovable catastrophe, which is now, well outside human agency ( aside from the looming boondoggle of geo-engineering). This is what the evidence shows.  We have effectively already become a self-fulfilling prophesy. The most dire warnings of the last three decades, have now become prophetic. What are eight non-reversible feedbacks if not a physical manifestation of a self-fulfilling prophesy?

To which Guy replies:

Daniel, you’re asking the same questions many others have been asking lately. I’ll try to respond with my next essay, which I’ll complete and post in a couple days.

(I’m pretty sure that next essay is this one: Playing court jester.)

Seems to reinforce the message.  That we really shouldn’t be surprised at the delusions, games and power interplays going on, especially in the corridors of power, so to speak.

Right! Time for me to show my hand!

I am totally convinced that we humans are responsible for the rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and that this accounts for the majority of the abnormal weather events being experienced in so many parts of the planet.

I think I’m right.  Therefore I give more weight to the evidence that supports my view that, guess what, reinforces me thinking I’m right.

Is that scientific?  Of course not!  Science is about producing reproducible outcomes. With, say gravity, that’s a piece of cake.

I’m not a scientist, far from it. Therefore the following statement may be unreliable.  That the problem with producing an uncontroversial, hard-wired proof that man is screwing up (you see, I did say that I wasn’t a scientist) our planet is that we don’t have other planets with which to test the thesis.  When it surely is an uncontroversial, hard-wired proof it will be too late!

Having said all that, tomorrow I will present the best evidence that I can find to support the notion that Dan’s beliefs are wrong.

Back to Casey and that scent:

P1110034
Now where’s that scent now? Sweeny, help me!
Hang on, let me finish sniffing your bum! Ask Ruby to help, she’s just by the fence.

We can never be as rational as dogs.  But maybe if we learnt to live more in the present, as dogs do so well, the world would be a much simpler and sustainable place.

Last words from Guy McPherson from Playing Court Jester,

On the road, there’s little possibility to develop a lasting relationship. I throw a Molotov cocktail into the conversation, and then I leave the area.

On the road, I describe how we live at the mud hut. I describe the importance of living for today. [my emphasis]

Integrity, part two.

A lifting of the importance of integrity is the key to our survival.

Let me start by reflecting on the difference between ‘truth’ and ‘integrity’.

Here’s one of the definitions of Truth: conformity with fact or reality; verity: the truth of a statement.

Here’s one of the definitions of Integrity: adherence to moral and ethical principles; soundness of moral character; honesty.

So while in yesterday’s article, I frequently referred to the word ‘truth‘, determining the ‘fact or reality‘ of a wide range of issues associated with anthropogenic climate change is not always straightforward.  Many of us probably have a strong intuition of the ’cause and effect’ of man’s footprint on this planet but a strong intuition is not the same as truth.

Then let’s turn to the notion of integrity. This is a much bigger issue, to my mind, the appalling lack of integrity!  Illustrated by one simple example.  How many leading politicians from any number of countries have demonstrated soundness of moral character; honesty with regard to the changing climate, even offering something as simple as “I don’t know!”

There’s a saying that pilots use, “If there’s any doubt, there’s no doubt!”  Come on, politicians and leaders, at the very least there is doubt!

OK, let me move on!

If integrity is partly defined as honesty, then while it’s easy to take a pot-shot at the world’s politicians maybe we need to look closer at home; ourselves.  Are we as honest with our own self as we now need to be?

Here’s an example that supports that question.

A few days ago there was a report on the website The Daily Impact about the crash of US fisheries.  Let me show you how that report opens,

Report: US Fisheries Crashing

We live in a country in which every household has two TV sets, most of them receiving hundreds of channels, and two cell phones, many of them “smart.” One of every two households has a computer connected to the Internet. This country is currently in the middle of a hotly contested presidential election. And yet among the things that have almost completely escaped public attention is this: last week the US government declared fisheries disasters on four coasts.

Reflect on that paragraph.  Surely it’s a reflection about the lack of integrity, of honesty, about our society?

The report ends thus,

The disaster declaration covering all these dire situations makes them eligible for Congressional aid, along with drought-stricken farmers in the Midwest and Southwest, flooded-out homeowners in New Orleans and along the Gulf, the fire-ravaged states of the far West, and the derecho-pounded Northeast. Congress will no doubt be delighted by the opportunity to help.

We eat nearly five billion pounds of seafood every year — about 16 pounds for each of us — and 85 per cent of it is imported (according to NOAA). Yet in the wake of this grim assessment of a large proportion of the domestic industry, and the questions it raises about the future sources of seafood, there is no discussion of “fisheries independence” or “peak fish” in politics or the media. Only in such outposts as this website and Mother Jones will the dire warning from the Commerce Department be reported as what it is — a dire warning.

Then there was a recent article on the Australian Permaculture news website about the US food and dairy industry.  Here’s how that opened,

Americans’ right to access fresh, healthy foods of their choice is under attack. Farmageddon tells the story of small, family farms that were providing safe, healthy foods to their communities and were forced to stop, sometimes through violent action, by agents of misguided government bureaucracies, and seeks to figure out why.

Filmmaker Kristin Canty’s quest to find healthy food for her four children turned into an educational journey to discover why access to these foods was being threatened. What she found were policies that favor agribusiness and factory farms over small family-operated farms selling fresh foods to their communities. Instead of focusing on the source of food safety problems — most often the industrial food chain — policymakers and regulators implement and enforce solutions that target and often drive out of business small farms that have proven themselves more than capable of producing safe, healthy food, but buckle under the crushing weight of government regulations and excessive enforcement actions.

I’m not going to insert that YouTube video into this post but you can link to both the full article and the film here.  For anyone interested in the fate of the family farm in the USA, the film is a ‘must see’!  Once again, the theme of integrity, of adherence to moral and ethical principles; honesty, comes to mind!

How I do want to close this rather personal reflection on present times (some may call it an indulgent reflection!) is by including a video from this seasons TED Talks.  It was brought to my attention by Christine over at her excellent blog 350 or bust.  The video is about resolving conflict,

William Ury, author of “Getting to Yes,” offers an elegant, simple (but not easy) way to create agreement in even the most difficult situations — from family conflict to, perhaps, the Middle East.

The reason why this seems like a very appropriate way to close this is because the way things are going at the moment, avoiding conflict could become rather important, rather soon!

No pain: No gain!

The truth is always our friend.

The last couple of weeks of Posts seem to have been rather dominated by the risks to the planet’s biosphere from the highly probable actions of mankind.  I feel a little uncomfortable about this as Learning from Dogs is not a single issue Blog.  Well not in the sense of a tightly defined issue.  But in another sense, it is about the issue of integrity; about raising the values of truth and openness so that it’s clear how we are to move forward as a species and pass through these ‘interesting times’ with hope and confidence.

Dogs are such pure creatures, as I try and explain in the Dogs and Integrity sidelink.  As I wrote in the Vision,

  • Our children require a world that understands the importance of faith, integrity and honesty
  • Learning from Dogs will serve as a reminder of the values of life and the power of unconditional love – as so many, many dogs prove each and every day
  • Constantly trying to get to the truth …
  • The power of greater self-awareness and faith …

So that’s the issue!

If we don’t embrace the truth of what is happening to our planet, then we can’t embrace change.

With thanks to the Yale Forum on Climate Change for promoting this video.